3 Things About Laura Dotson You Probably Didn’t Know

If you’ve been watching television anytime between 2010 and today, then you’ve surely heard of Storage Wars. It’s one of several reality TV shows about storage facility auctions that capitalizes on the saying “One man’s trash is another man’s junk.” Kidding. Treasure.

If the rent on a storage unit is not paid for three months, California law says that the facility owner is allowed to sell the contents in an auction, in which the buyer must purchase the unit’s contents as a whole. Sometimes the buyer strikes gold, sometimes the buyer strikes crap.

Laura Dotson, along with her husband Dan, run a business called American Auctioneers and is featured on the A&E show as an auctioneer. You hear a lot about Dan, and you certainly hear a lot about Dave Hester, but when it comes to Laura Dotson, here are 3 things you probably haven’t heard about her:

Laura was in the restaurant business before turning to auctioneering.

Before she and Dan met, Laura Dotson was in the restaurant business. One fateful day in 1993 she was opening a new restaurant and searching for pizza-making equipment, when she came across Dan who was selling a restaurant and its paraphernalia at an auction. Their eyes met across the crowd where he claims to have been flirting with her while she thought he was just trying to get her to buy a lot of stuff.

And that’s when she got auction fever. She sold her restaurants, watched him auction for a while, and finally decided to put her penchant for non-stop talking to good use. At her first auction she got top dollar for the items and seems to have found her calling in life. As a bonus, she gets to fulfill her dream of being in the center of attention.

A&E discovered the Dotsons via YouTube because Laura made videos of their auctions.

Back in about 2007 or 2008, Laura decided that Dan, as a third-generation auctioneer, should have video footage of what he was doing. Also, she wanted video footage of herself. So they arranged to have cameras in the self-storage facilities and then they uploaded them to YouTube.

One day a man shows up at one of their auctions expressing interest in doing a reality show on them who turns out to be TV producer Thom Beers. He knew who they were and what they did because he had been watching their YouTube videos. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Laura has a net worth of $4.5 million.

Apparently the junk business is good business because Laura is worth a cool four and a half mill. Of course, her husband Dan is reportedly worth exactly $4.5 million, too, so they may have a combined worth. To put this into perspective, Dave Hester, “the belligerent buyer-slash-villain” of Storage Wars, has a net worth of $3 million, another reality (and I’m using this word loosely) show star Kim Kardashian is worth $85 million, and Paris Hilton, a has-been reality show celebrity wannabe socialite is worth $100 million. It’s a strange world we live in.

Selena Templeton is a writer and editor who sees the world through Giggle Glass, a type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display plus false nose and mustache. It reveals the absurd, amusing, and inappropriate goings on of daily life and displays it in a lap top-like hands-on format, from which she posts to various blogs such as Self Storage Finders, Romantically Challenged, and SelenaTempleton.com. As a former professional organizer and a current Virgo, she is a self-diagnosed authority on storage, packing, organizing, and general neat freakishness.